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Politics Thread V: The Final Frontier

mack

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Never trust a 'liberal progressivist' (that term is anathema to me as they are anything but 'liberal' or 'progressivist').

They should just be known as treasonous liars. They don't have any altruistic intentions. http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/634815/Cologne-attacks-fury-migrant-sex-cover-up-refugee-event-groping-GermanyMan my blood just boils. An uncontrollable rage burns in my veins when I read this ****.

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/01/14/inheritor-to-goebbels-propaganda-ministry-calls-mohammed-a-feminist/

With a clear dose of sarcasm, Ms. Hübsch opens her article: “Suddenly, we live in a country in which you are constantly worried about the safety and dignity of womenâ€, and lays the blame for sexual assault in Germany firmly on the shoulders of “sexist and misogynistic†Western pop culture. Far from being a source of trouble for Europe, Islam is a civilising influence, reasons Ms. Hübsch, with Mohammed cast as an early campaigner for women’s rights, reports Junge Freiheit.

 

Even his child bride Aisha is roped in to provide evidence of his positive attitude towards women. Any “misogynistic traditions†within Islam are the fault of the “male orthodoxy†working to discriminate against women by corrupting “appropriation†of the faith.

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Obama’s State of the Union Climate Nonsense, Debunked
 


The Associated Press
by JAMES DELINGPOLE13 Jan 2016794
President Obama’s final State of the Union address was full of nonsense, especially on the matter closest to his heart —energy and the environment.
Look, if anybody still wants to dispute the science around climate change, have at it.  You’ll be pretty lonely, because you’ll be debating our military, most of America’s business leaders, the majority of the American people, almost the entire scientific community, and 200 nations around the world who agree it’s a problem and intend to solve it.
If you put enough swill in the trough, Mr. President, the piggies will come running.
Our military
The military are on board because the government pays them to be (see also Muslim outreach; women in the military; etc) and because the Commander in Chieforders them to be.
America’s business leaders
The corporations are in it to “greenwash†their image and because they welcome the extra regulatory costs which are effective at closing down smaller competitors. Also, if they’re called Solyndra or Bright Source, or they’re part of the subsidised wind industry, they’re in it because you’re bribing them with taxpayers’ money.
The majority of the American people
In a Pew Survey in November last year, 45 percent of Americans considered climate change a “serious problemâ€, 41 percent believed it was “harming people now†and 30 percent were “very concerned it will harm me personally.†Not a majority then.
Almost the entire scientific community
The scientific community — like the military — is largely dependent on public funding, which is currently heavily geared towards the “global warming†scam. Still, we know that since 1998 more than 31,000 scientists â€” 9,000 with PhDs — have signed a petition disputing man-made global warming theory. We also know that the ’97 percent consensus’ figure often cited by Obama (but not this time: his spin doctors are getting cannier) has been roundly debunked as a complete fabrication.
200 nations
If they really think climate change is such an urgent threat, how come not one of them at the recent COP21 meeting in Paris agreed to do a damn thing about it?
But even if the planet wasn’t at stake; even if 2014 wasn’t the warmest year on record – until 2015 turned out even hotter – why would we want to pass up the chance for American businesses to produce and sell the energy of the future?
a) because those record temperatures you quote are another fabrication. The satellite records show no recent warming trend — and anyway it was probably hotter in the Medieval, Roman and Minoan warming periods when there were no 4 x 4s or Chinese power plants.
b) because government is lousy at picking winners. If American businesses wish to make money out of “the energy of the future†then they should take all the financial risks and reap all the benefits.
Seven years ago, we made the single biggest investment in clean energy in our history.
Surprised you want to bring that one up, Mr. President. Solyndra alone cost the taxpayer over $500 million before it filed for bankruptcy. Your green jobs program has been created at costs variously estimated at between $82,000 and $2 million per job.
Here are the results.  In fields from Iowa to Texas, wind power is now cheaper than dirtier, conventional power.
Just. Not. True.
On rooftops from Arizona to New York, solar is saving Americans tens of millions of dollars a year on their energy bills, and employs more Americans than coal – in jobs that pay better than average.
As with wind, solar jobs are non-jobs. Potemkin jobs. Like the industry itself, they only exist because of massive taxpayer subsidies. When the grants dry up, the industry dies — as happened to SolarCity’s UK offshoot when subsidies were slashed.
We’re taking steps to give homeowners the freedom to generate and store their own energy – something environmentalists and Tea Partiers have teamed up to support.
“Freedom†is not something the government is in a position to “give,†only to take away. Which is basically how you’re funding this scam — taking away the money of poorer energy users to bribe richer, cannier energy users to install solar panels on their roofs etc.
Meanwhile, we’ve cut our imports of foreign oil by nearly sixty percent, and cut carbon pollution more than any other country on Earth. Gas under two bucks a gallon ain’t bad, either.
Not you, Mr. President. This is down to fracking (none of which took place on federal land because you’re ideologically opposed to it) and geopolitics. You actually did your best to make gas more expensive by nixing Keystone XL.
Now we’ve got to accelerate the transition away from dirty energy.
AKA cheap, effective energy. Good luck with that. It currently supplies at least 87 per cent of the world’s needs.
Rather than subsidize the past, we should invest in the future – especially in communities that rely on fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels aren’t subsidized in any meaningful sense of the word. Stop fobbing us off with green propaganda.
That’s why I’m going to push to change the way we manage our oil and coal resources, so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet.
ie regulating them out of existence — confiscating private property in order to deal with the imaginary problem of global warming. We understand that this sort of thing is what happens in places like Mao’s China and Stalin’s Soviet Union. But in early 21st century USA? Really?
That way, we put money back into those communities and put tens of thousands of Americans to work building a 21st century transportation system.
High Speed Rail: the Solyndra of the transportation system
None of this will happen overnight
Or, indeed, ever if the electorate wakes up and smells the coffee.
And yes, there are plenty of entrenched interests who want to protect the status quo.
Yeah, pesky stuff like fiscal responsibility, scientific integrity, economic credibility.
But the jobs we’ll create, the money we’ll save, and the planet we’ll preserve – that’s the kind of future our kids and grandkids deserve.
But the needless Potemkin jobs we’ll subsidize (destroying real jobs in the real economy), the money we’ll print, and the planet we’ll help ruin with more wind turbines and palm oil plantations and untended overgrown forests ruined by our eco Nazi spotted owl regulations — that’s the kind of green horror we intend to inflict on future generations because that’s the kind of people we are.

 


Opinion piece rubbish. No offence, but seriously....

This paragraph has so much truth to it:

Almost the entire scientific community
The scientific community — like the military — is largely dependent on public funding, which is currently heavily geared towards the “global warming†scam. Still, we know that since 1998 more than 31,000 scientists â€” 9,000 with PhDs — have signed a petition disputing man-made global warming theory. We also know that the ’97 percent consensus’ figure often cited by Obama (but not this time: his spin doctors are getting cannier) has been roundly debunked as a complete fabrication.

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ABC silence on refugee policy

 

Kerry O’Brien, Germany’s ZDF avoid responsibility in journalism

 

The Australian

January 16, 2016 12:00AM

 

As journalists, by means of social media, increasingly become activists in the public debate, what is not reported sometimes becomes as significant as what is.

 

Take the New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne, for example. It took ZDF, Germany’s public broadcaster, four days to report that up to a thousand men of Middle Eastern and North African appearances had sexually and physically assaulted women who were celebrating the arrival of 2016 outside the Cologne Cathedral. Similar, albeit not so extensive, attacks occurred in such cities as Dusseldorf, Frankfurt and Hamburg.

 

Elmar Thevessen, deputy chief editor of the Heute (Today) program, acknowledged on Facebook that “it was a mistake of the 7pm Heute show not to at least report the incidentsâ€. Thevessen conceded that the decision to self-­censor was “a clear misjudgmentâ€.

 

But a mistake with a purpose. It seems that the powers-that-be at Germany’s taxpayer-funded public broadcaster did not want their fellow citizens to know that the Cologne assaults on women were led by young men from Muslim majority nations who may have been recent asylum-seekers — or what many in Western Europe refer to as migrants.

 

Among the left-liberal intelligentsia that dominates ­Western media, it is just unfashionable to refer to radical Islamists as radical Islamists or to mention the fact that in some Muslim majority ­nations women are treated as ­second-rate citizens, or worse. The fact that so many left liberals are slaves to intellectual fashion explains why so few self-declared feminists have publicly criticised the Cologne assaults.

 

The same can be said of the low-key response to the grooming of around 1000 white girls in the British city of Rotherham by men of Pakistani heritage. These crimes were overlooked, for many years, by those in positions of authority who did not want to be accused of Islamophobia.

 

The tendency of left-liberals, who like to parade a higher ­morality than the rest of us in such matters as immigration and multiculturalism, does not start and end with modern-day Islam. I was reminded of this when reading Kerry O’Brien’s biography Keating (Allen & Unwin, 2015).

 

Paul Keating was a successful treasurer in Bob Hawke’s Labor government who successfully ­challenged the incumbent prime minister in December 1991. Keating defeated the John Hewson-led ­Coalition in 1993 but went on to lose to John Howard in 1996. By then, Labor was running out of steam — much like the Coalition began to falter before its defeat in 2007. Yet, in his time in Australia’s top political job, Keating left his mark.

 

One initiative of the Keating government, which is not often discussed in polite left-of-centre circles, turns on the introduction of mandatory detention in 1992 at about the time that there were ­unauthorised arrivals by Indo­chinese, among others. Sure, Keating’s contribution to the economic reform in Australia deserves to be the priority when the political life and times of Aust­ralia’s 24th prime minister are discussed. However, the Keating legacy does not end there.

 

Mandatory detention is still in place today, almost a quarter of a century after it was introduced. It’s just that O’Brien, a long-time journalist with the ABC, Channel 7, Channel 10 and one-time press secretary to former Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam, does not want to focus on such an unfashionable legacy.

 

O’Brien’s biography grew out of his four-part ABC TV interview series Keating: the Interviews which aired in 2013. The text of Keating runs for 765 pages. Yet it is not until page 758 that O’Brien ­introduces the issue of asylum-seekers and mandatory detention. The whole discussion takes up a mere two pages.

 

O’Brien does not challenge Keating’s defence of the policy. Which is that the then immigration minister, Gerry Hand, advised the cabinet “to set up detention centres for the orderly processing of asylum-seekersâ€. As Keating told O’Brien: “When the immigration minister tells you his department is losing control of the process, and this was the remedy coming from the leader of the Left, we accepted itâ€. The position of the Keating gov­ernment was that the left “would have the human rights issues coveredâ€.

 

This was an extraordinary statement. Especially since the left, in Australia and elsewhere, in the 1960s and 70s had a record of supporting totalitarian dictatorships in China, Vietnam, Cuba and elsewhere. But Keating’s excuse was good enough for O’Brien. In the interview extract printed in the biography, O’Brien virtually invited Keating to have a go at his successor, John Howard. Not surprisingly, the former Labor prime minister accepted the offer, with a vengeance, and accused Howard of “jingoismâ€.

 

In fairness to Keating, mandatory detention probably would have been introduced even if Hawke had remained in office. New Year’s Day saw the release of the cabinet records for 1990 and 1991, the final two years of the Hawke government. They reveal that in June 1990 cabinet agreed to take a harder line on refugee claims. O’Brien, who recently stepped down as presenter of the ABC TV’s Four Corners program, is more than a journalist. During the time of the Howard government, he spoke at functions which called for a relaxation of the Coalition’s position on asylum-seekers in general and mandatory detention in particular. Yet, in Keating, O’Brien has adopted a don’t-talk-about-Labor’s-mandatory-detention position.

 

In recent times, O’Brien has criticised the policy of former prime minister Tony Abbott on asylum-seekers. Writing in Quadrant Online (December 21, 2015), former Age journalist Tony Thomas reported on the launch of Keating at the Melbourne Press Club last November. After praising Keating’s leadership, O’Brien condemned Australia’s “great failure†with respect to ­asylum-seekers. In response to Thomas’s question as to how many unauthorised arrivals O’Brien would take in a year, the former ABC journalist responded, “I am not a policy­makerâ€. In short, O’Brien wants to hold fashionable opinions about asylum-seekers without accepting any of the consequences of his advocacy.

 

The retired ABC presenter’s position is not dissimilar from that of the journalists at Heute. They did not want to be unfashionable, so they evaded responsibility by not reporting the events at Cologne on New Year’s Eve. Sometimes the story is that the real story is not told.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Europe’s new Medieval map

 

Robert D. Kaplan

The Wall Street Journal

January 16, 2016 5:48PM

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hanover, Germany. A revived Russia has overrun eastern Ukraine and again threatens the EU’s borders.

 

 

Look at any map of Europe from the Middle Ages or the early modern era, before the Industrial Revolution, and you will be overwhelmed by its dizzying incoherence — all of those empires, kingdoms, confederations, minor states, “upper†this and “lower†that.

 

It is a picture of a radically fractured world. Today’s Europe is, in effect, returning to such a map.

 

The decades of peace and prosperity, from the 1950s to 2009, when the European Union’s debt crisis began, made the political and economic contours of the continent look simple.

 

There were two coherent blocs for the duration of the Cold War, and they were succeeded by the post-Cold War dream of a united Europe with its single currency.

 

Today, as the EU suffers one blow after another from within and without, history is reversing course — toward a debilitating complexity, as if the past half-century were just an interregnum before a return to fear and conflict.

 

For the US, the reality of this new situation is only just now coming into view. Europe, whose economy rivals that of the US as the largest in the world, remains an asset and an ally, but it is also a profound problem. The pressing question is how to manage it.

 

Europe’s divisions were visible for decades as the EU worked to expand its boundaries and practical reach. There were those countries inside the EU and those outside; those inside the borderless zone of free travel (the Schengen Area) and those outside; those able to manage the financial rigours of the eurozone and those unable to do so.

 

What is less appreciated is the deep roots of these divisions in the continent’s history and geography.

 

The sturdy core of modern Europe approximates in large measure the Carolingian Empire founded by Charlemagne in the ninth century. The first Holy Roman Emperor, he ruled the lands from the North Sea down through the Low Countries and radiating outward to Frankfurt, Paris, Milan and so on.

 

 

A sturdy core: an artist’s depiction of Charlemagne, also known as Charles the Great.

 

The weaker cousins of this Europe extend along the Mediterranean, from the Iberian peninsula to southern Italy and the historically less-developed Balkans, heirs to the Byzantine and Ottoman traditions.

 

During the decades following World War II, this divide was suppressed because of Europe’s relative isolation from its “near abroad†— that is, from the regions of North Africa and Eurasia that, for centuries, did so much to shape the distinctive character of the continent’s periphery.

 

Today that wider geography can no longer be ignored, as Europe’s various regions adopt very different attitudes to the threats posed by Russia’s bullying under President Vladimir Putin, the flood of refugees from the Middle East and the latest terrorist outrages at home and abroad.

 

It has become clear that the centralisation imposed for decades by the EU and its distant, unrepresentative bureaucracy hasn’t created a unitary Europe. Indeed, it has created a powerful backlash across the continent, one that the EU can survive only by figuring out how better to establish its legitimacy among its diverse nations.

 

The geographical defences that shielded Europe during the post-war era no longer hold. When the great mid-20th-century French geographer Fernand Braudel wrote his classic work on the Mediterranean, he didn’t treat the sea itself as Europe’s southern border. That, he suggested, was the Sahara.

 

Today, as if to prove him right, migrant caravans assemble across North Africa, from Algeria to Libya, for the demographic invasion of Europe proper. The Balkans, too, have resumed their historic role as a corridor of mass migration toward Europe’s centre, the first stop for millions of refugees fleeing the collapsed regimes of Iraq and Syria.

 

Europe thus now finds itself facing an unhappy historical irony: the decades in which it was able to develop its high ideals of universal human rights, including the right of the distressed to seek havens in Europe, was made possible, it is now clear, by the oppressive regimes that once held sway on its periphery.

 

The Arab world was slammed shut for decades by prison states whose dictator-wardens kept their people in order. Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Assad family in Syria, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya — they allowed Europe to have its idealistic cake and eat it, too.

 

Worse for European unity, geography and history have conspired to make some regions of the continent more vulnerable to the flood of migrants and refugees than others.

 

As Germany and parts of Scandinavia lay down a very tentative welcome mat, Central European countries such as Hungary and Slovenia erect new razor-wire fences.

 

The Balkans, virtually separated from the rest of Europe by war and underdevelopment in the 1990s, have now been dealt another blow by the anarchy in the Middle East.

 

At the southeastern extremity of Europe, Greece, once a poor Ottoman province, has seen its economic crisis exacerbated by its unlucky position as the gateway for hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing the Arab world’s turmoil.

 

Another critical factor in the period of relative stability now coming to an end in Europe was the geopolitical role played by Russia.

 

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was an obvious strategic threat, but it was a threat well-managed by the US, and for most of the period, after Stalin’s demise, the Kremlin was led by stodgy, risk-averse functionaries. After the Soviet collapse, a decade of turmoil and institutional weakness in Russia meant, among other things, that it was no threat to Europe.

 

Today, needless to say, Russia is very much back as a strategic player in Europe. Mr Putin’s consolidation of control inside Russia following the infirmity of the Boris Yeltsin era has created a deep divide between Paris and Warsaw, Berlin and Bucharest.

 

If you were a Pole or a Romanian in the 1990s, Russia was conveniently weak and chaotic, and membership in NATO and the EU held out the prospect of lasting peace and prosperity.

 

The strategic horizon is very different now: The future of the European enterprise appears uncertain, and a revived Russia has annexed Crimea, overrun eastern Ukraine and again threatens your own borders.

 

Here we may be witnessing the start of a remarkable reversal of Cold War alliances. Europe is again redividing into halves, but this time it is Eastern Europe that wants to draw closer to the US because it increasingly doubts that NATO alone will be an effective defensive barrier against Russia.

 

Meanwhile, the countries of Western Europe, worried about the tide of refugees and terrorist attacks at home, seek to draw closer to Russia (the Ukraine crisis notwithstanding) as a hedge against the chaos emanating from Syria.

 

Mr Putin knows that geography and raw power — both military and economic — are still the starting point for asserting national interests.

 

Europe’s elites take a very different view. After centuries of bloodshed, they have largely rejected traditional power politics. To maintain peace, they have instead placed their hopes on a regulatory regime run by the post-national technocrats of Brussels.

 

In their minds, the continent’s divisions could be healed by the social-welfare state and a common currency. Distinctive national identities shaped by centuries of historical and cultural experience would have to give way to the European superstate, whatever its toll on the political legitimacy of the EU among the diverse nations of Europe.

 

In the UK and much of Western Europe, there is now a backlash against the overreaching of Brussels, and it is finding powerful expression in domestic politics.

 

Social-welfare policies once touted as a balm for the continent’s divisions have acted as a drag on national economies, and this stagnation has provided, in turn, the backdrop for nationalist (sometimes reactionary) politics and rising hostility to refugees.

 

Still another set of concerns is visible in Central and Eastern Europe. For the past three years, I have been travelling back and forth to Romania, a country where World War II ended only in 1989, with the downfall of the Stalinist Ceausescu regime.

 

In Romania, as in the Baltic states and other parts of the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union, the EU still represents more than a balance sheet.

 

It stands for a politics based on modern states rather than on ethnic nations, governed by the rule of law rather than by arbitrary fiat, protecting individuals no matter their ethnic or religious group, or their father’s name.

 

The region from the Baltic states and Poland, south to Romania and Bulgaria, and then east to the Caucasus constitutes what I call the Greater Intermarium (Latin for “between the seasâ€, in this case, between the Baltic and Black).

 

The Intermarium was a concept invented by Josef Pilsudski, the Polish leader of the 1920s and ’30s, who hoped to see a belt of sturdy democracies between Germany and the Soviet Union to thwart the imperial tendencies of both.

 

The threat today, of course, is solely from Russia and not from Germany. Germany’s political dominance of Europe should flow naturally from its economic dominance, and that has happened to some degree, with power moving east from Brussels to Berlin.

 

But German leadership remains awkward and hesitant. Of all the European elites, Germany’s in particular have, since the late 1940s, put their faith in European integration, in large part as a way to exorcise the demons of their own past.

 

In the face of multiple crises, Chancellor Angela Merkel has played a deft political hand, with only occasional setbacks like the recent news of sexual assaults committed on New Year’s Eve by Arab migrants.

 

But Ms Merkel is no Bismarck or Frederick the Great, nor would she want to be. The legacy of Nazism and the ambivalence of sitting between the West and Russia weigh heavily against German leadership.

 

As the EU continues to fracture, this power vacuum could create a 21st-century equivalent of the late Holy Roman Empire: a rambling, multiethnic configuration that was an empire in name but not in fact, until its final dissolution in 1806.

 

This means that there is still no alternative to American leadership in Europe. For the US, a Europe that continues to fracture internally and to dissolve externally into the fluid geography of Northern Africa and Eurasia would constitute the greatest foreign-policy disaster since World War II.

 

The success of the EU over many decades was a product of American power, stemming from the victory over Nazi Germany. For all its imperfections, the EU, even more than NATO, has been the institutional embodiment of a post-war Europe that is free, united and prosperous.

 

Elements of the Obama administration, to their credit, have tried valiantly to grapple with Europe’s post-Cold War disintegration. The Pentagon has put forth plans for the return of more ground troops, and Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, has been energetic in standing up to Russia in Ukraine.

 

But President Barack Obama himself has evinced a certain lack of interest in the continent’s travails and has taken a less than robust posture toward meeting Mr Putin’s aggression.

 

The administration is plainly distracted, its attentions focused on crises not only in the Middle East but in the Pacific Basin as well.

 

The problem is not, however, the US President’s much-discussed “pivot to Asiaâ€, where US leadership is also very much needed to rally our allies. The problem is the mistaken idea that somehow Europe matters less than it did during the Cold War.

 

The current administration and its successor must put the security of the Greater Intermarium at the centre of its priorities. This is a matter not just of more military aid but of more robust diplomatic engagement with every country from the Baltic to the Black seas.

 

The aim should be not just to resist Mr Putin’s aggression but to maintain the internal cohesion and capacity of both the EU and NATO.

 

At the political level, this will mean helping the EU to develop in a direction that provides more democratic accountability.

 

As for security matters, a turn to Europe will mean putting an end to the counter-productive view that the US will do more for Europe’s defence only if NATO member states themselves raise their defence budgets. With a few exceptions, that isn’t going to happen amid today’s economic woes. If Europeans were to see greatly intensified US involvement, however, they would be more likely to take bold actions to save their own institutions.

 

The decades when we thought of Europe as stable, predictable and dull are over.

 

The continent’s map is becoming medieval again, if not yet in its boundaries then at least in its political attitudes and allegiances. The question today is whether the EU can still hope to permanently replace the multicultural Habsburg Empire, which for centuries sprawled across Central and Eastern Europe and sheltered its various minorities and interests.

 

The answer will depend not only on what Europe itself does but also on what the US chooses to do. Geography is a challenge, not a fate.

 

Robert D. Kaplan is the author of In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond and a senior fellow at the Centre for a New American Security.

 

The Wall Street Journal

 

 

 

 

 

 

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